Life on the Rails

[Admiral Yi]

She gave had given his short story a happy ending in graphic prose.

Don't leave us hanging! 

[Savonarola]

Poor CB and the "erotic" stories Sav sends

[Savonarola]

Ken and the Wasp

I was out testing with Ken one day.  As we were walking he yelped in pain.  Something had stung him, and every few steps we took he kept saying, "This really hurts."  By the time we made it back to the car his hand had noticeably swelled up.  By that evening his whole arm was swollen.  Ken had gotten stung by a wasp.  There's a small, aggressive variety of wasp in Colombia that we always ran into.  Everyone offered Ken Benadryl or Claritin; but he insisted he was fine.  The next morning his arm was swollen up like the Fred Flintstone arm.  He had to go to the Irotama medic and get some shots.  That incapacitated him throughout the day.  At Irotama there's a maid which opens the curtains in the morning, one who cleans the floors, one who makes the bed, then one who closes the thin curtains in the afternoon, one who puts macaroons on the pillows and one who closes the thick curtains at night.  Ken was woken by all of them.  He put the "Do not disturb" sign on his door, but in Colombia that's viewed of as a suggestion not to be taken seriously.  Even if you try to bar the door they'll beat on it several times just to make sure you really want to have it latched.

The reason why everyone had Claritin and Benadryl to offer is that GE had put together a "Travel kit" for people going to the third world.  It was filled with over the counter anti-histamines, Imodium, off-brand Tylenol and the like.  By the midpoint of last year they had run out, and didn't buy new ones.  They did give us a list of recommended over the counter medicines; probably assuming that no one would go get them.  I did; I made a trip to CVS and got a bonanza of unbranded medications.  Since I live in Florida the store clerk didn't even look twice, I'm sure that wasn't the strangest thing she had seen that day.

It was a good thing I got all that, because those wasps were everywhere.  One time I opened one of our cases and a swarm of them flew out.  They didn't go after me; instead they flew into the car.  This happened at our southernmost case, and all the way back to Santa Marta my driver and I both sat as still as we could.  Occasionally we'd open the windows and shoo them out.  I ran into them several other places, and got stung twice along the way.  Their sting packs a wallop, it hurts for several hours.  Ken, and also Gary, had a bad reaction to their sting; that put them out for a whole day.  I was lucky that I did not.  I took my store-brand Benadryl immediately after getting stung and bobbed around drowsily for the rest of day.

[Savonarola]

The loves of Glen

The women of Colombia are voluptuous, like most Latinas.  In the fire lands they emphasize this by wearing very short skirts, plunging necklines and high heels.  Many of the women in cities are pretty with a darker complexion and smoky eyes.  Glen didn't have a girlfriend back home, so he was looking for a woman.  Unfortunately he was busy for most of his time in Colombia and had time for romance. 

In his three month stay he had only a couple days off.  Back in those days they were stingy with the drivers; so it was hard to leave the resort on a day off.  One time Glen had struck a bargain with Sofia.  He would have a driver, but only until noon.  So he and his driver went up to the Parque Tayrona.  Parque Tayrona has beautiful beaches and start of the Sierra Madre de Santa Marta Mountains, but locally it's probably best known for its hippy colony.  A number of middle-aged Americans on expired visas live there, smoke pot and live on the occasional check from back home.  The natives steer clear of them as did Glen when he went to the beach.  He and his driver stayed until the appointed time.  The driver started pointing at his watch, and Glen said "I'm staying, so you have to stay."  The driver didn't speak a word of English, but understood as Glen went and got another beer.

On his other day off he met a group of British tourists who stayed at Irotama.  They had a nubile daughter; but she was engaged.  As they got to talking, Glen discovered that she had a cousin who was interested in railroad.  They were going to meet her at the beach at Irotama.  Glen, assuming that she was trying to fix up her cousin, readily agreed to meet him.

It turns out that her cousin was actually interested in rail, and was about twenty years older than the girl Glen had first spoke with.  He answered her questions as quickly as he could, just to get the conversation over with.

Glen was hired by GE for a role unrelated to the FeNoCo project.  I talked with him on his last night in Colombia.  When I told him about Jeff's girlfriend; he said "I can't believe he got one before me.  I had one that I think was interested in me.  I asked her out, but she has to go to Bogota tonight."

"You wouldn't have seen her again," I said.

"Yeah, but I'm just trying to get laid."

"When did I become so old?" I asked.

He did keep in contact with her via text and mostly with the aid of Google Translate.  The division of GE that Glen now works for just got a product order for the rail systems in Santa Marta.  Being low man on the totem pole, Glen is probably the one who will have to return there.

"At least I'll get to see her again," said Glen.

"And have a romantic dinner with Google translate?"  I asked.

"We'll just meet for drinks and then it's down to business."

"When did I become so old?" I asked.

Bill once talked to one of the clerks when he was staying at Ventanas.  She said she made about $25,000 per year; by way of comparison the track security people make $6000.  Bill asked her if that was a lot of money.  She said it wasn't.  She wanted to get an American husband; then go to America and get a master's degree and a job in the United States.  I told Bill Colombian gold diggers are quite different than our own.  For this reason I was a little surprised Glen didn't have greater success, but he was almost always working and a rail yard is no place to meet a lady.

[Syt]

The loves of Glen

The women of Colombia are voluptuous

[Savonarola]

The loves of Glen

The women of Colombia are voluptuous

She's very tall by Colombian standards, but otherwise about the right dimensions.

[Savonarola]

Language

One time I had worked all night hooking up switches.  Morning came and we still weren't done, so we decided to get breakfast on the road before continuing.  Ken, a couple FeNoCo line engineers and I went to a roadside restaurant.  I gave my order in Spanish, the waitress rolled her eyes and looked at one of the FeNoCo engineers who served as our interpreter.  I shrugged and repeated my order to the FeNoCo engineer in Spanish, and the waitress wrote it down as I was saying it.

Language was the greatest challenge in my time in Colombia.  Many of our suppliers, contractors and drivers spoke only Spanish.  Communicating with them was always a problem.  Different people would handle this in different ways.  Bill, for instance, always took Sofia with him wherever he went.  This was a good idea, since Bill ordered "Mucho mas coffee" every morning for breakfast.  Our waitress knew enough English to know what he meant.

Since everyone couldn't take a bilingual Colombiana with them wherever they went, other solutions had to be found.  Many of my co-workers and the drivers made do with Google translate or a similar program.  I found those programs worthless; they had poor translations and usually failed to translate crucial words.  One quirk was that our driver's would write down "Don" as a form of address which the Google translated as "Lord."  It was strange to have Google address me as "Lord Savonarola."

Some people, like Glen, could pick up on body language and understand whole conversations without speaking a word of Spanish.  I cannot, so I used Duolingo to learn the language.  I had studied some Spanish at a community college, so it was in part a review.  The problem at first was that my Spanish would come out mostly as French.  I was convinced I was wasting my time trying to learn Spanish when I saw a poster that said "Jaime Serrano" and I was puzzled why anyone would feel the need to proclaim his love for Spanish ham (J'aime Serrano.)  It took me a while to realize that was the name of politician.

In time I could carry on a basic conversation in Spanish.  One time we were at the bank with my driver and he was speaking to me.  After he was done a woman who was in line behind us asked my driver "He speaks Spanish?"

"When I speak it," my driver replied.

"He's very intelligent," she said.

"I'm a married man, you whore!" I said.

(Not really; actually I didn't say anything; but in the version of this I show my wife I'm keeping that line in.)

The Spanish speakers had a great deal of difficulty conveying technical information even to one another.  Spanish is more verbose than English.  One of our supplier's engineers was a native English speaker.  He said that when he would translate manuals from Spanish to English often he would delete whole paragraphs; they didn't really say anything they just set the scene.  This caused extensive problems as our translators put the manual from English into Spanish they had to add information like that.

So I was still limited, even with a basic knowledge of Spanish.  I did pick up some technical terms that were odd to English ears.  The outer jacket on coaxial cable is called "Malla," like our word mail, as in chain-mail.  Another was the male connectors were "Macho," hence a male-male connector was "Macho-Macho."

[Savonarola]

Super Bowl Party

Kevin had rented out a conference room at Irotama so that we could watch the Super Bowl.  I was scheduled to go to Drummond that day with Jeff; but I figured we'd be back before kickoff, since Jeff was from Seattle.

That turned out to be a vain hope.  While Jeff had expressed some interest in seeing the Seahawks play we kept getting sucked into project after project.  Finally we agreed to work on one last train as it was moving.  We got our equipment installed and we waited on the train as it went through the dumper.  The dumper at the Durmmond yard is an amazing device.  It picks up four cars at once and turns them sideways so that all the coal tumbles out of them.  It's an enormous machine with an enormous counterweight.  We passed through the dumper and watched it unload the first four cars; for a moment Jeff and I were like young boys, watching in utter amazement.

Then the train stopped and we waited, and waited, and waited.  We were stuck there for an hour with nothing to do, until the station manager finally got out a golf cart to rescue us.  There had been some problem on the track and the train couldn't advance.

I got back late, and was only able to watch the second half of the game.  The meeting room had a large movie screen on which the game was projected.  We sat on banquet hall chairs.  Kevin had found a restaurant which had chicken wings; and he had put together a buffet of those.  He had cookies and chips as well; the Colombians don't just have potato chips.  Instead they'll have potato chips, plantain chips and Cheetos all in the same bag.  He also had numerous six packs of the local beer, Club Colombia.  It was strange to sit there so far from home trying to carry on American culture.  It didn't convince everyone, I had met Glen returning to his room as I was heading to the game.  He wanted to try to find American TV, since all the commercials were local and in Spanish.

A number of our local team and the Brazilians were there as well.  All of them were trying to figure out what was going on.  I met Diego that night.  Diego was Colombian, from Santa Marta.  He worked as our track manager; that is he coordinated issues between our team and the ports or FeNoCo.  He had managed to get on the bad side of FeNoCo, and he was constantly being cited for rules violations.  In turn he would constantly report FeNoCo's people for violating their own rules.  Eventually he was kicked off the project and we sent him to our project in Michigan.

Sofia told me that Diego spoke a very florid Spanish, so that anything he told our customers turned into a lengthy production.  This annoyed FeNoCo as well as the American team. When Bill was presenting a Power Point Presentation to them he would speak for two minutes, and then Diego would translate for twenty.  Bill would just stare, wondering what he could have been translating.

We got to talking, since I am from Michigan and I was familiar with the area where he would be living.  I asked him if he had ever seen snow before; he assured me he had.  He had a girlfriend that he wanted to bring to Michigan, but GE was lukewarm about doing that.  They were willing to give him a whole shipping container, but not airline tickets for his girlfriend.  Kevin suggested that he drill some holes in the shipping container and bring her up that way.  Jeff said he should call her his "Domestic partner," rather than his girlfriend.  She was at the party and, while she was definitely worth drilling a few holes in a shipping container for, I'm not sure what she would have done in Jackson, Michigan since she spoke no English.

[Savonarola]

Gerard

For most of the early phase of the project Bill and Kevin had requested additional resources for help on the project.  It was becoming clear that we didn't have enough people to complete the project according to schedule.  This is how I became a field engineer despite never having worked in the field or how Mike became the lead on board engineer despite never having been on a locomotive.  At least Mike and I had worked in transportation; when we lost Diego we became so desperate for people we ended up with a track manager from GE Energy, Gerard.

Gerard was German.  He was an older man; and had come out of retirement to work on this project.  He had been the project manager on the GE project in Iraq after the Second Gulf War. That was a billion dollar project he had managed, he told us time and again.  He had other stories about the project that he told repeatedly: he had lost five engineers on the project, his office had been bombed, it was a large and important project.  It was tedious and self-important, but he always put the wine on his expense report.

Apart from telling war stories, Gerard never seemed to do much.  He couldn't speak Spanish, so he was unable to coordinate with the railroad or the ports.  Whenever he was out in the field, even as far south as Fundacion, he would come back and have lunch at Irotama then take a nap.

"What are you going to do when you're working down in Bosconia?"  Bill asked.

"It's very hot outside," Gerard answered.

It was, but like mad dogs and Englishmen the rest of us worked in the heat of the midday sun.  Both Bill and Kevin complained to their managers about Gerard.  They got the "We feel your pain/let's all work together speech," that our leadership always gave.

This ended one day when Gerard was out in the field.  He told his driver where he wanted to go; the driver went, but Gerard thought he was going the wrong way.  An argument ensued, entirely in gestures since neither spoke the others language then, according to the driver, Gerard put his hand on the wheel.  Gerard said he did not, but either way they ended up in the ditch.  It took them about an hour to get the car out of the ditch and Gerard had his driver sit in the passenger seat and drove back to Irotama.  When he got there he cursed out Bill and then Kevin and then called up Kevin's boss to curse him out.  Gerard complained that the team didn't know what it was doing.  We had no plan.  We had no support.  We had no chance of completing this project.  It turned into a long shouting match, but it got results; Gerard was kicked off the project.  We were told explicitly that we were to have any contact with him; so naturally everyone on the team tried to talk to him.

Gerard was given a one way ticket back to Paris.  He changed his tickets to Melbourne and showed up at our office Monday morning.  The head of operations wasn't in, so he camped out at Mike's office for three days, still seething.

Nothing came of Gerard's visit.  The only changes that were made on the project after Gerard left were that we no longer sub-contracted out drivers; all the drivers were SIMS employees.  Also we were no longer allowed to ride with anyone but SIMS drivers; we had been taking rides from our customers and suppliers before that.  This was an unfortunate result since our supplier had trucks with much better shocks, and they had all disabled the 80 KMPH regulators.

[KRonn]

It was strange to have Google address me as "Lord Savonarola."   

Lol, I agree. "Your Grace" would have been more appropriate.   

[Savonarola]

Glen and the dogs

There are stray dogs everywhere in Colombia; almost all are mutts and skinny.  Packs of dogs wandered the beaches just past the hotels.  There were dogs in the ports; some guarded the locomotive shops, and would growl when strangers came in.  Huge gangs would gather outside of the cantinas after lunch hoping for scraps.  Strays would wander the streets of the cities.  Every station had at least a couple dogs.  They were everywhere.

One time when we were at CNR, as we were driving out our ride was delayed as he was being searched.  As the driver was sitting there a dog snuck under his car to lay in the shade.  The driver didn't realize that, and ran right over the dog as he started up again.  We took the dog to the animal hospital, and they set his leg.  We expensed that as needed for goodwill at the port.

Our northernmost station at Cienaga had the largest a number of strays of any station.  Most were smart enough to stay a long way from the tracks, but there was one who would go right up to the tracks as the train was passing and just stare at the train.  One of the security guys took a towel, wrapped it, and from six feet away smacked the dog on the head.  The dog yelped, snapped out of it and would wander off away from the train.

"Could you imagine being that guy's younger brother?" asked Glen.

Glen might not have had luck with the ladies of Colombia, but he joked that he still had plenty of bitches.  He loved dogs; he had adopted a puppy from Cienaga station.  If he had leftover lunch he would put it out for the dogs.  The mining companies packed huge lunches, so on days when we were registered as working for them we each had enough left over lunch to feed another person and a pack of dogs.  Glen would always make sure his puppy got fed first and then let the rest have at it.

The Colombians thought he was crazy for doing this.  One of them decided to mess with Glen one day while he was feeding the dogs.  He told him the most devastating insult he could think of, "Colombians are better than Americans at soccer."  That didn't seem to faze Glen.

Later he bought dog food.  We had a shipping container which we had converted into a make-shift office and supply room at Cienaga.  He kept paper plates and dog food in there.  Anytime anyone visited they went out and fed the dogs.  Then the Colombians thought we were all crazy.

Glen's dog got into a fight.  Glen found him in pretty rough shape one day.  Glen took him to the animal hospital.  Glen, Nick and Ken chipped in to have the dog stitched up, and he was as good as new, but Glen realized that would probably happen again.  So he looked into adopting the dog and bringing it to the United States.  It's possible to do that, but it's both expensive and time consuming.  Glen was unable to afford it, and had to leave the dog in Colombia.  He'd ask me about his dog after I came back (and he was no longer on the project.)  I didn't see him my last time there; but fewer GE people were coming to the Cienaga station at that time, so he might have wandered off.

[Savonarola]

Santa Marta and the Bank

Colombia and the United States have a trade agreement, and almost everything can be imported without duty.  There's an issue with goods clearing customs; for instance US manufacturers will do quality control on a box of hexagonal nuts by weight.  A box of 100 nuts should weigh a certain amount within a threshold of tolerance.  In Colombian customs someone will count every nut in the box and if we're one over or under they'll reject the entire shipment.  The manifest will be altered and we'll start all over again.  Things like that were our most persistent problem, but there were other issues.  There are still some goods which do have import duty, as we found out.

One day Sofia got a notice that we had received a package which still had a duty on it via FedEx.  In a larger city you could simply go to the FedEx office, pay the duty and get your package.  In Santa Marta there is no FedEx office.  A private delivery company had brought it to Santa Marta on behalf of Fedex.  They held the package for us, but they were not authorized to receive a duty payment.  So, in true Colombian run-around fashion, we had to go to the bank, show our letter of duty, pay, get a stamp of authorization, and take the stamp of authorization to the delivery office to release the package.

I was drafted to go with Sofia to the bank, since at the time Sofia was still a contractor and there were only a handful of GE employees in Colombia.  For that reason I had been given the role of the bank (Bill usually filled this role).  The drivers would buy lunch and give me the bill; I reimbursed them and expensed their receipts.  Fortunately our expense reports were not too closely monitored.  At one point Bill ended up staying at some truck stop hotel on the road.  For a receipt they gave him a piece of paper with the amount he paid on it.  That expense report went through.

I had a company AMEX; the type I had was for Travel.  It wasn't supposed to be used for taxes, for that we were supposed to use the Purchase AMEX.  The problem with that was that fraud protection was all over the purchase card.  Whenever anyone tried to use one they would always be rejected.  Upon calling AMEX they'd learn that there was a block on the card for purchasing in Colombia.  AMEX would clear the block and the card would be rejected again.  Calling AMEX back they'd learn of another block on the card to be cleared, only to find the card would be rejected again.  Bill said he once got five blocks deep before giving up and using the Travel Card.  We'd put "Supplies for Meetings" on the expense reports for the travel cards.  That always worked.

We went to the Bank of Colombia in Santa Marta.  There were guards there with machineguns.  I waited in line for a half an hour only to discover that the Bank of Colombia does not accept foreign credit cards for purchases, so I had to go to the ATM and pay the tariff with cash.

This wasn't the last time I had trouble with credit cards in Colombia.  On what was supposed to be my last trip home I got stuck carrying an enormous antenna.  At the check in the agents told me they'd have to charge me extra to bring it on.  I said that was fine, and pulled out my AMEX.  They couldn't take that, they said, their internet was down and they couldn't process credit cards.  I couldn't pay for it in Bogota, where the internet would presumably work since they didn't have authorization.  Instead I had to go to the ATM again.  Bill was at the station next to me, and similarly had an additional bag.  They let him take his additional bag for free; maybe they thought he wouldn't be able to get cash, or maybe I didn't look like I'd punch the airline representative.

Sofia told me that, because FedEx and UPS don't have much of a presence in Colombia, you can contract with Avianca to ship supplies.  You go to the airport and buy space in the cargo hold.  You can also do the same thing with truckers or with bus companies.  "They inspect packages closely," she warned me, "So it isn't a good way to ship cocaine."

When I got home from Colombia during the two month break I had in June and July I met our field engineer, Chris in the lab.  The first thing he said to me is "I brought your dildo home."

"My what?"

He had brought back a Yagi antenna, which I guess could look like a sex toy for a giantess.  He also showed me another box he had brought back.  It was the box I had gone and paid the tariff on.  It had never been opened.

[Savonarola]

Crossings

Currently all the crossings on the track are operated manually.  That is a security guard gets a notification that a train is approaching by radio.  He holds up a stop sign until traffic stops and then puts up plastic fencing and pylons.  He keeps them there until the train passes and then takes them down.

In order for this system to work the trains have to slow down considerably at crossings.  In the places where there's unrest FeNoCo wanted to have trains maintain speed, so they contracted three crossings from us.  It took quite a while to get these built, since Freddy Panda was our contractor on this one.  Once they did get the first one built we discovered that the gates reached down onto the train track; had we ever lowered them the train would have smashed through them.  Bill shouted at Jovega until he was hoarse and we were back to the drawing board.

These were supposed to have been completed in March; we were putting them together at the end of May.  At that point Bill was so determined to get done that he had taken to working 40 hour shifts.  By the end of the shift he was incoherent.  He ended these monstrous shifts with staff meetings.  Even under the best of circumstances, Bill's meetings were unfocused.  These meetings wandered off in rambling directions as Bill struggled to remain lucid.

Bill went out into the field to oversee the testing of the crossings.  The one he spent the most time at was the busiest crossing in Bosconia.  There are a number of different ways the crossing can operate; they can be set by the office computer if it knows the location and speed of the train, they can be set by radio if the driver sends out a code, or they can be set by completing the track circuit right by the crossing.  The tracks are all set up as circuits, so if a train passes over the circuit in the same section as the gate it completes the circuit, so the crossing will activate.  This caused us a problem; one night when Bill was in Bosconia there was a torrential downpour.  The drainage isn't the best in Colombia so the track flooded, causing a short, which set off the gates.  In other countries that wouldn't have been a problem, motorists would have stopped when they saw the signals flashing and waited.  In Colombia the people ignored the signals entirely, and kept going.  So a truck got stranded on the tracks as the got closed.  I wasn't there to see this, but I was with Ken, who was on the phone with Bill and I could hear him hollering, "He's not going to... he's going to run the gate!  Dog shit!  DOG SHIT!"

So we had to replace the gate arm.  I was called in to help with some problems with the radio.  We spent all day there.  Across the track there was a snack shop that played Cumbia all day long at top volume.  With the noise, the heat, the dust, and traffic it was miserable day.  We'd have to stop working about every fifteen minutes so a train could pass.  We had a test train to test the crossing with, but we could never get track time.  WD was working on board that day; he'd get on a train at the station and ride it past the crossing to the siding and then get off.  Then he'd go back the other way.  He did this all day.

The Colombians did not take the crossing warnings seriously.  The security guards would have to get out on either side with stop signs, and even then the first few cars would run the tracks.  They would then put up their plastic fence and pylons.  Then our gates would come down.  Motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians would still race over the tracks until the train was right about on them.  Everyone would line up to the gates as close as possible; so close that Bill had to rush out and move a pedestrian out of the way before he got smacked by the gate.  Once the train passed and the guards pulled down the gates it became like the start of a two way motocross rally.  Pedestrians, bicycles, cars, and motorcycles all rushed directly at one another.

We discovered a serious problem in our software; the crossing would disarm and the gate would go up right as the train was getting to the crossing.  For obvious reasons we couldn't let this go into production, so we set our software department to work on this.  It took two months to validate the software, and we were sent back out into the field to test it again.

This was the last item in the project; by completing this we had met all our project deliverables and could end engineering support.  We went to Prado Plaza first thing Monday morning after we arrived.  Bill always says that he wants to have a quick meeting where we knock things out right away.  Once we get there he'll talk about his kids, his flight, his house and the like so that what should be a thirty minute meeting turns into a two hour epic.  Even with that we still didn't manage to beat FenoCo into submission; we had asked for production locomotives from one of the mines, but what we got were FeNoCo's two ancient test locomotives.

Bill is ever the optimist, we were going to go down to Cienaga station (the station closest to the ports), fix up the locos so they could run in test mode, be done right after lunch and go home to rest before we went to work that evening.  In fact the locos we needed weren't even at Cienaga station.  Once they got there we found all sorts of problems on them.  WD wasn't done with the locos until 7 PM; somehow in all his work he acquired my needle-nosed pliers and never returned them.

The first night in Aracataca went very well.  Our biggest excitement came as we hiked over the tracks from the edge of town into the darkness of the Colombian night.  I had to walk over a bridge where open ties were laid across an open trestle; there was a full moon that night so I could clearly see the ties; and I could even make out the river below.  The humidity is so much in the fire lands Colombia that even without light pollution the stars are little more than a hazy mass.

The second night was in El Paso.  The tracks are far from the gasoline shanty town on the road.  There it feels like we're at the end of the earth.  Everything went perfectly there.  This is a crossing because it lies on a dirt road "Highway."  It's a route that goes between two swamps connecting El Paso with cities on the Magdalena River (this is the "Pass" that El Paso refers to."  From where we were it looked like the road went out into the heart of darkness.  The only traffic was an occasional late night bus.

Everything had gone so well on our first two nights that we thought we would have no issue at Bosconia.  Trouble started right away, though, we were supposed to start around nine PM.  At dinner we discovered that FeNoCo had not socialized the train work.  Bosconia is an area of unrest, so FeNoCo has issued a curfew in the area, trains do not run after 10 PM.  In order to do late night work in the area FeNoCo needs to socialize that work; that is they go from door to door telling the residents what they plan to do.  If no one has any objections we can start work.  If not then we have to hold off.  Bizarrely, no one ever objects; so long as FeNoCo asks, work can proceed without a problem.  So we waited.  Eventually they did get us permission and we could start work at midnight.  Then we found the next problem, one of the gates didn't go down.  None of us there had a good grasp on track signaling, so we kept going from the bungalow with the track circuitry to the circuitry at the gates.  It rained throughout the night, and we huddled in the bungalow trying to read circuit diagrams.  We could get the gate to go down, but it wouldn't go all the way up.  The bell was still sounding and the lights were flashing on all the gates as the one stood there not quite straight up.  Finally, at four in the morning, Bill found that he had connected one of the terminals too tightly, so he gave one nut one quarter turn and everything worked fine.

That proved to be a short lived victory, though, the next day the crossing was acting up again.  Bill said that we would replace the crossing arm; and WD's face fell.  Jovega had changed the crossing arms before, and it had taken them two weeks.  Our team did it in an hour and a half, the crossing was active before we even had permission to start work.  The crossing that was failing was the one that the guy had hit.  Bill speculated that had done damage to the motor, and the motor had simply burned out so it couldn't go all the way up.  While we were testing the crossings we had a guy drive out again and get caught between the crossings. 

I'm afraid there's going to be a long and lethal learning curve for the crossings.  Eventually they want to build 50 crossings like this; and get rid of all the track crossing guards.  As of today they're nowhere near ready to do that.  Even with the crossing guards people will still get hit by trains from time to time.  When I was there early in the year a family of four was killed because they tried to take the gate on their motorcycle while the train was approaching.

[Savonarola]

Rick, Safety Issues and an Iguana

One day I was at lunch with some of my coworkers.  Glen was now onto other projects and he was describing how different the standards of safety were in the United States.  They needed to trim the top off of an antenna on top of a train in order to get it to exactly one quarter wavelength of their frequency.  So they sat around waiting two hours for the antenna cutter to show up, go to his safety meeting, inspect all his equipment, get fully suited in his safety harness, then get craned onto the top of the train, and then trim the antenna.  They discovered that they weren't getting quite the response they hoped for, so they had to get the antenna cutter again, after his lunch, another safety meeting, another equipment check and another suit up.

This contrasted with my coworker Brian's adventures in Brazil.  There he had a repeater in a tunnel that was not functioning properly; so the Brazilians drove a diesel train into the tunnel and kept it running while Brian and two technicians got on top of the loco without any safety harness and diagnosed the problem with the repeater.  There was no ventilation, so as they worked the tunnel slowly filled up with diesel fumes.

I never saw anything that went quite to that extreme in Colombia, but the safety standards were noticeably lax.  We'd climb up to the roof on locos without any safety gear and no one would care.  Sometimes there would be a FeNoCo safety engineer who would stare at us as we performed all sorts of safety violations; he didn't seem to care either.  They even let Jeff and WD drive trains in the yard in Colombia.

In such an environment accidents were inevitable.  Whenever they did we would call in our safety engineer, Rick.  Rick was a Peruvian man who immigrated to the United States when he was eighteen.  You could tell he was good safety engineer because the very first thing he did whenever he got a hotel room was try to yank the safe out of the wall.  If he could do that he would demand another room.  On his first visit Irotama sent him to three rooms before he found one where the safe was secure.  I think the staff grew tired of him quickly, because the fourth room they sent him to was infested by fire ants.

Rick took his job seriously and sent out a lot of memos.  Many times safety's dictates were trivial; like Rick's e-mail telling us not to get bitten by mosquitos.  Other times their dictates were counter-productive.  Rick once told our drivers that they were not allowed to talk on the phone and drive; so whenever the driver's received a phone call they would stop in the middle of the road, put on their blinkers and take the call.  We had one guy do that in downtown Santa Marta, and he talked on the phone oblivious to all the horn's blaring behind him.

Even so safety performed a vital task, figuring out who to blame.  One of the first times Rick was down a man fell off the tower.  It was from only a few meters above the ground, but he was still injured.  He had been strapped into the safety harness and he still fell.  After a lengthy investigation it was found that the harness was in bad condition; but he, his supervisor and the safety coordinator had all signed off on it.  All three were removed from the project; but in true Colombian fashion all were back within a couple weeks.

At least that one had his harness on.  We had three contractors fall off our towers within two weeks; each one wasn't wearing a safety harness.  None of them were seriously injured, but every time the entire team got a lecture from Rick on the importance of safety harnesses, and they'd be back up to climbing the tower without a harness the next day.

Most of the time things that went wrong were our fault; usually the fault of our contractors.  One time Jovega took a crane and put up poles by stretching across the track.  They didn't tell anyone they were doing this, so if a train had come along it would have run right into the crane.  Bill caught them doing this and told them to stop, but the crane operator told him to fuck off.  So we got Rick involved and that crane operator was fired from the project; once again he was back within a couple weeks.

The cranes were often a source of problems.  Any time a large obstruction like that is put within five meters of the track speed restrictions need to be put in place.  Since FeNoCo wasn't always willing to grant such a request, Jovega would sneak in the cranes and put up the poles without permission.  They got caught once doing this when their crane got stuck in the mud four meters from the track.  Speed restrictions then had to be put in place and an irate FeNoCo called us up.  Rick went down there, got a thorough account of what had happened and told them this could never happen again; so it was no surprise that the very next day another crane got stuck in the mud three meters from the track.  Then when they tried to tow the crane out the towing crane got stuck as well.  The two cranes just sat there for days on end, and the speed restrictions had to be set to fifteen KMPH through the stretch.  Once again everyone responsible was fired to be back within a couple weeks.

Not everything was our fault.  People would take their livestock across the track.  I saw a cow that had been hit by a train; the entire village had gathered around to watch the cow die.  It was a grisly scene, the cow was shaking and obviously in a great deal of pain.  Rick said he saw the same thing with a horse.  One of the farmers was taking his horse across the track right in front of a train.  The horse became skittish.  The farmer tried to drag the horse forward; but it was too late.  The farmer was livid, but Rick told him, "Sorry, it's your fault."

If there was ever a problem with a train and a track switch there was always a major issue.  One time the FeNoCo crew had set a switch wrong and our test locomotive ended up on a siding.  Our operations were shut down for a week as an investigation was launched.  They didn't give us a set time for shutdown, every day we were told to be at CNR at 8 AM in order to run the test; and every day by 10 we were told us we wouldn't be running today.  One of our engineers, Phil, had extended his stay in Colombia by a week in order to do the test runs; he was stymied until he went home.  He never came back.  At the end of the week FeNoCo told us something to the effect of "We realize this isn't your fault, but we're blaming you anyway."  That was their standard response whenever they had problems with track switches.  There was another time a train had run over a switch; it wasn't far enough that it caused problems, but a track switch moving by itself is a major issue.  They rounded up everyone who had worked in the office the night before and interrogated them.  They did it early in the morning, and then later in the afternoon leaving our third shift with almost no time to sleep.  In the end it turns out the train had caught the switch arm.  Again it wasn't our fault, but FeNoCo blamed us anyway.

Rick was the safety engineer for the project; and almost every issue that we had was handled by him.  The one issue that was not was the Gerhard incident; since Gerhard had cursed out a director we got Hector, the man in charge of safety for all of Latin America to investigate the issue.  That is why the dictates were so draconian, and so widely observed.

Fortunately there were not issues every day, so Rick was able to enjoy himself at the pool some.  Iguanas run about Irotama.  They climb up to the tops of trees to sun themselves, or scurry about the grounds.  Being a safety guy Rick stayed clear of them.  Other guests weren't so cautious.  I watched one guy pull down a branch holding an Iguana on to his girlfriend.  I heard a lot of words they don't teach you in Spanish class from her.  Rick saw a guy come up and try to pet an iguana who was in the pool area.  The iguana whipped around, cutting its tail deep into the man's leg.  With the slick surface near the pool he was knocked over and ended up bruised and bleeding.

[Savonarola]

Holidays

Our supplier was supposed to deliver equipment in the early part of third quarter 2014.  It was late; since we did not yet have licenses for frequencies, our supplier had made this delivery a low priority.  Even if we had it in the country we couldn't have done anything with it.  This line of reasoning did not convince Bill.  We were on a conference call when they announced the date had slipped.  Bill became livid, and began making demands.  He told them when they needed to have the equipment delivered; and how many installations they would have to do per week.

"But we can't do that without working weekends," said Javier.

"You're working weekends, you're working every day," Bill said.

That was true for us.  There were no days off in Colombia.  We worked long hours every day of the week.  Kevin, when he was in town, liked to take Sundays off and take the team with him to see coffee plantations or to go hiking.  When Kevin wasn't in town, and he usually wasn't, we worked straight through the weekends.

This was very different than the Colombians.  There are twenty one official holidays in coastal Colombia, a seemingly equal number of unofficial holidays and, if the Colombians go more than two weeks without a holiday they throw a party.

That proved to be a nuisance for us.  The vacation group at Irotama would get a band and throw a party on the beach every so often.  We'd get a note in our room telling us that there would be a party, but the staff would be monitoring the noise.  They didn't, the music would be at ear splitting volumes even half a mile away at the hotel.  The music varied from traditional Caribbean music to Colombian disco.  Parties would start at nine PM and go on to four in the morning.  Our whole team looked haggard the next morning at breakfast.

When I first arrived it was Christmastime.  Santa Marta was all decked up in lights and they had a large crèche in the public square.  Everyone seemed to be in a holiday spirit; even at the railyards the atmosphere was festive.  Men would sing as they were washing up at the end of the day at work.  There were paper decorations in the cantinas.  All the lines shut down early for a holiday party on the Friday before Christmas.  We were invited to celebrate at the CNR cantina where we were treated to a surprisingly British Christmas dinner of roast beef, mashed potatoes and pudding.  They had a folk band which played traditional Christmas songs in Spanish. 

In the country electricity was rarer, so they didn't have the extensive lighting of Santa Marta.  Instead they hung colored paper ornaments and tinsel in trees.  They would take two rubber tires and stick them one on top the other then paint both of them white.  Then they would take a cardboard cut into a circle and painted like a snowman's face or coal buttons and put them in the middle.  It was strange to see snowmen, reindeer and a bundled up Santa Clause as a holiday decoration in a land which never sees snow.

The Christmas season lasts until the Sunday after the Epiphany.  The season goes strong right up until the end.  We had a two week shutdown starting the week before Christmas.  I was in the United States for both Christmas and New Year's, but we did have people start returning to the market before New Year's Day.  WD couldn't understand why he couldn't find anyone to work late on New Year's Eve.  Glen was there, he complained that most of the team wasn't interested in celebrating the New Year.  The only person he could find to go out with him was Alejandra.  They went to one of the nicest restaurants in Santa Marta, Barakuka, to ring in the New Year.  Barakuka is located on a hill, so they could watch people shooting fireworks off all over; that were the way Colombians rang in the New Year.

The next major holiday is Carnival.  Lundi Gras and Mardi Gras are both holidays on Colombia's Caribbean Coast;  Barranquilla has the largest and best known Carnival celebration in Colombia.  I flew in to Colombia on the Sunday before Carnival; there were high winds on the coast as we were trying to land.  The pilot made two attempts to land, both times they had touched down but taken off again immediately.  The captain came on and said something to the effect that if we weren't able to land the next time he would have to fly to Barranquilla.  Rather than the collective rage I had anticipated, there was a quiet murmur of approval.  We did manage to make it down on the last attempt to the disappointment of some.

In Santa Marta the holiday is more subdued than Christmas; but the rail yards still had up paper decorations.  This time they were all of carnival masks.  The most popular was La Marimonda, which looks sort of like an elephant, but with exaggerated lips and circles around the eyes.  It's the favorite because it's the only carnival mask to originate in Colombia.  The others are of European or African design.  Most look like the carnival masks of Venice; some were more exotic like El Tigre.  Some came from a very different culture than our own in the United States; El Africano would most certainly not win the Al Sharpton seal of approval.

During the week before Carnival children will get in front of cars at traffic stops and dance.  When they're done they hold out their hands to ask for money.  Generally young children do this, but Nick saw older teenagers doing it as well.  He rolled his eyes and said "It's like high school seniors going trick-or-treating."

The next major series of holidays is Holy Week.  That is a primary vacation time for Colombians.  During that week Irotama was overflowing with guests; it was hard to find a table at a restaurant in the resort or even in the city.  Every night there were parties.  The parties peaked on Saturday, though, and Easter Sunday is a day of travel.  I had spent a night in Bosconia during the Holy Week.  Bosconia isn't a travel destination the way Santa Marta is.  It was still noisy and exciting; street parties and discos went on late into the night, and they shot off fireworks.

Irotama used the Italian Restaurant which overlooked a pool for church services.  The Easter Sunday services were among the most laid back church services I've ever attended.

Easter Sunday was the only day off I had in my entire stay in Colombia; and I had the day off because I couldn't find anyone else to work.  I was nearing the end of a three week stint at that point, and apparently I had turned into WD in my time there.  The drivers and the train engineers all complained that I was forcing them to work Holy Thursday and Good Friday.  The test train I had scheduled for Easter Sunday had "Maintenance Issues."  It's chair had been broken and it had to be taken back the entire length of track to be repaired.